The following research is guided by the hypothesis, that products chosen on a shopping trip in a supermarket are an indicator of the preference interdependencies between different products or brands. The bundle chosen on the trip can be regarded as an indicator of a global utility function. More...

This article examines basic features of ranked Conjoint-data, analyzes the adequacy of evaluation methods and proposes improvements for better utilizing the information provided by ranked data. It is shown that commonly used goodness-of-fit measures provide inadequate proxy measures for...

Basic confounding patterns for full-profile conjoint analyses based upon ranking are examined. It is shown that commonly used orthogonal main-effect designs can lead to biased part-worth estimates, especially to an underestimation of less important variables. An alternative design procedure is...

The forecasting of time series in goods management systems causes various problems that we identify and indicate possible solutions. The implementation of auxiliary information like promotional activities or calendar effects in forecasts using ARMA models and exponential smoothing methods may be...

In this paper we use 4 different time series models to forecast sales in a goods management system. We use a variety of forecast combining techniques and measure the forecast quality by applying symmetric and asymmetric forecast quality measures. Simple, rank-, and criteria-based combining...

It is increasingly observable that in different industries competitors jointly acquire and share customer data. We propose a modified Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity to analyze the incentives for such agreements and their welfare implications. In our model the...

The 40 years of socialist regime in East Germany were characterized by a massive anti-entrepreneurship policy. We investigate the reemergence of entrepreneurship in East Germany during its transformation to a market economy following the collapse of the East German state in 1989. It took about...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person?s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

Does the information provided by mass media have the power to persistently affect individual beliefs about the drivers of success in life? To answer this question empirically, this contribution exploits a natural experiment on the reception of West German television in the former German...

This paper investigates the influence of the political regime on the relative importance of conspicuous consumption. We use the separation of Germany into the communist GDR and the democratic FRG and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment. Relying on household data that are...